WESTERN FRONT – Conversation with Nina Davies and Ruby Justice Thelot

A clear backpack floating against a black background, with tan-colored hands or gloves visible inside and a smartphone in the front pocket displaying the portrait of a person in a dark shirt.

As part of the opening reception for Nina Davies’ solo exhibition Image Syncers, she will join designer, cyberethnographer, and artist Ruby Justice Thelot—the writer of the essay accompanying the exhibition—for a conversation.

In his text, Thelot writes of Image Syncers:
“The dancers inhabit the stutters, glitches, and discontinuities of machinic motion, performing bodies that appear algorithmically misrendered, as if they had slipped out of the frame of human legibility and into the error language of computer vision.”

Together, Davies and Thelot will discuss the work’s engagement with AI-generated imagery, choreography, the dissolution of reality, and the appeal of fakeness.

The opening reception will continue following the talk until 7:00 p.m.

About the Speakers

Nina Davies is a Canadian-British artist who considers the present moment by observing dance in popular culture and how it is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed. Working primarily with video, performance, writing, and installation, her work considers current dance phenomena in relation to the wider socio-technical environments from which it emerges. This includes research into the recent commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms, and rethinking dances of today as traditional dances of the future. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices.

Nina Davies stands in theatrical space. She looks directly at the camera with her hair down and hands placed behind her back. She wears black tracksuit pants and a bright lime coloured sports top.

Ruby Justice Thelot is a designer, cyberethnographer and artist based in New York. He is a professor of Design and Media Theory at New York University. He is the founder of the award-winning creative research and design studio 13101401 inc.

A person with short, tightly braided hair is photographed from the shoulders up, standing in front of a large, bright, out-of-focus light shape that creates a glowing halo effect behind their head; the person is wearing a dark collared garment.

Accessibility

The Grand Luxe Hall is located on the second floor of Western Front, which is accessed by a flight of 26 stairs. While plans for a full building upgrade to facilitate access for wheelchair users are still underway, events in the Grand Luxe Hall are made available virtually via high-quality livestream (see link above). Further details about accessibility at Western Front can be found here.

Acknowledgement

Presented with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Nina Davies, Image Syncers (2025), video still. Courtesy of the artist.

Nina Davies, Image Syncers (2025), video still. Courtesy of the artist.
Portrait of Nina Davies. Photo by Rachel Topham Photography.

Portrait of Nina Davies. Photo by Rachel Topham Photography.
Portrait of Ruby Justice Thelot.

Portrait of Ruby Justice Thelot.

Western Front is a non-profit artist-run centre in Vancouver.

We acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as traditional owners of the land upon which Western Front stands.